Cross-channel campaign

While it’s not new, the term ‘customer experience’ is often defined the wrong way. The customer experience is the sum of all contact moments a customer has during his life cycle. Just think of it this way: whenever you are in touch with a brand, regardless of channel or type of interaction, you want consistency and the same level and quality of response to your needs and queries.

The customer experience, as the total of all touch points, is gaining more attention than ever among marketers.

Having a single view of the customer and connecting systems and processes to improve conversion and increase loyalty are seen as the way forward in enhancing efficiency.

The financial services industry is among the leading industries when it boils down to embracing the multichannel consumer. However, multichannel alone is not enough, research shows. Personalization is key as well.

Several financial services companies work with Selligent Interactive Marketing to realize a cross-touchpoint and multichannel strategy (read the BNP Paribas Fortis case study here, for instance).

The number of consumers embracing mobile and the Internet keeps growing. Nevertheless, when dealing with personal-finance  matters, consumers often still prefer to be in touch with their local bank branch.

An increasing number of international email marketing experts is looking at email from an integrated perspective whereby a cross-channel marketing approach, focusing on the consumer’s buying journey and the customer lifecycle, is put in the centre.

This shift from a campaign-centric to a people-centric approach is been happening for a while now, and we’re glad it confirms what we have been emphasizing for several years. Although campaigns obviously still have their use, clearly in a fragmented media environment, the focus increasingly lies on the journey, behavior and lifecycle of people, regardless of channels.

It’s indeed exactly the customer-centric and holistic vision, we have built our Selligent Interactive Marketing solution around. As I wrote in a previous post, consumer preferences are taking the center stage of the marketing strategy. Several reports show that cross-channel marketing is hot while recent research indicates how this impacts data integration.

There is a new breed of consumers. We know them as the connected consumers. One immediately thinks about social networks and their fast-growing  pace. However, most people are connected in more ways than ever before, even if they are not using social networks: with and via digital devices, online applications and an exploding number of media.

The proliferation of media and channels, the technological and digital evolutions and the growing control of consumers has led to a fragmented and multi-channel buying journey. The consumer is indeed connected in many ways. And the best approach to interact with him is using connected technologies in a personalized way. It’s time marketers get in touch with the demanding consumer again.